Jung's "The Red Book"

[lb_lee]

Mori: Finally dug into Carl Jung's The Red Book because the library says, "Dude, you have to give that back tomorrow, no rechecks!" Should've done it sooner, so yes, collectively , I will ABSOLUTELY borrow your copy, because holy shit:

Jung also had a sense of living in two centuries, and felt a strong
nostalgia for the eighteenth century. His sense of duality took the
form of two alternating personalities, which he dubbed NO.1
and 2. NO.1 was the Basel schoolboy, who read novels, and NO.2
pursued religious reflections in solitude, in a state of communion
with nature and the cosmos. He inhabited "God's world." This
personality felt most real. Personality NO.1 wanted to be free of the
melancholy and isolation of personality NO.2. When personality
NO.2 entered, it felt as if a long dead yet perpetually present
spirit had entered the room. NO.2 had no definable character. He
was connected to history, particularly with the Middle Ages. For
NO.2, NO. I, with his failings and ineptitudes, was someone to
be put up with. This interplay ran throughout Jung's life. As he
saw it, we are all like this-part of us lives in the present and the
other part is connected to the centuries.

As the time drew near for him to choose a career, the conflict
between the two personalities intensified. NO.1 wanted to pursue science,
NO.2, the humanities. Jung then had two critical dreams. [...] After these
dreams, he settled for science. To solve the question of how to
earn a living, he decided to study medicine. He then had another
dream. He was in an unknown place, surrounded by fog, making
slow headway against the wind. He was protecting a small light
from going out. He saw a large black figure threateningly close.
He awoke, and realized that the figure was the shadow cast from
the light. He thought that in the dream, NO.1 was himself bearing
the light, and NO.2 followed like a shadow. He took this as a sign
that he should go forward with NO. I, and not look back to the
world of NO.2.

In his university days, the interplay between these personalities
continued. In addition to his medical studies, Jung pursued an
intensive program of extracurricular reading, in particular the
works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Swedenborg,II and writers
on spiritualism. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra made a great
impression on him. He felt that his own personality NO.2
corresponded to Zarathustra, and he feared that his personality
NO.2 was similarly morbid. [...]

On reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Text-Book of Psychiatry
in 1899, Jung realized that his vocation lay in psychiatry, which
represented a fusion of the interests of his two personalities.
He underwent something like a conversion to a natural scientific
framework. [...]

[Jung] had studied the works of Frederic Myers, William
James, and, in particular, Theodore Flournoy At the end of 1899,
Flournoy had published a study of a medium, whom he called
Helene Smith, which became a best seller. [This is From India to the
Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages] What was novel about
Flournoy's study was that it approached her case purely from
the psychological angle, as a means of illuminating the study of
subliminal consciousness. A critical shift had taken place through
the work of Flournoy, Frederick Myers, and William James.
They argued that regardless of whether the alleged spiritualistic
experiences were valid, such experiences enabled far-reaching
insight into the constitution of the subliminal, and hence into
human psychology as a whole. Through them, mediums became
important subjects of the new psychology. With this shift, the
methods used by the mediums-such as automatic writing,
trance speech, and crystal vision-were appropriated by the
psychologists, and became prominent experimental research
tools. In psychotherapy; Pierre Janet and Morton Prince used
automatic writing and crystal gazing as methods for revealing
hidden memories and subconscious fixed ideas. Automatic
writing brought to light subpersonalities, and enabled dialogues
with them to be held. For Janet and Prince, the goal of holding
such practices was to reintegrate the personality.
Jung was so taken by Flournoy's book that he offered to
translate it into German, but Flournoy already had a translator. [...]

For Jung, [...] insanity was not regarded as something completely set apart
from sanity; but rather as lying on the extreme end of a spectrum.
Two years later, he argued that "If we feel our way into the human
secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and
we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction
to emotional problems which are not strange to us." (pg. 195-196)

Comments

[lb_lee]

Yeah, I feel like I'm surely missing something, because no way it could be what it sounds like, right? I've been smacking my head against stupid multi books for years, but this is the first I've heard anything about Jung, and he's kinda famous! Surely it must be something more ambiguous, right?